Stirring up s*** again

This week, John Cooley published an email I sent him regarding DATE on Deep Chip and stirred up a load. 


The bottom line is I said I heard that the Design Automation and Test Exposition (DATE)  was not long for this world.  This is based on what I was told a couple of years ago when EDA Ltd. was bought by TechInsights.  TechInsights decided they did not want DATE, so they allowed EDA Ltd employees to take it over, including the binding contracts with Munich and Nice in 08 and 09, and see if they could make a go of it.  Well the report from Nice was that DATE had a 47 percent drop in attendance from 2008.  This was the second straight year of decline.

My statement was a response to Cooley's previous report outlining the decline.  Before I wrote to John, I visited the DATE website where it had a headline.

DATE'09 conference was a huge success

I thought it was a weird headline considering what John had reported on the attendance, so I threw in my 2 cents, which was based on what I had heard two years ago and had had verified by multiple sources since.  I understood that DATE was on life support and if it didn't come back by 2009 it was gone.

Well, that produced a nasty response from Paul Double who reps Tanner EDA in Europe.  This afternoon I went back to the DATE website and saw the headline had been changed.

DATE'09 conference was a huge success - next DATE will be in Dresden/Germany from 8-12 March 2010

The good news is that my interpretation of the events has now created some visibility for an event that many people (really, it wasn't just me) thought was dead.  And it didn't cost DATE any marketing money.  So just to be clear, DATE is apparently still alive.  Ya'll should go.

Comments

  1. Grant MartinMay 20, 2009 at 1:11 PM

    Lou

    Well, at least I sent a (hopefully) polite note to John Cooley pointing out that you were mistaken about DATE and that it is planning to hold its conference in Dresden in March 2010. I think the mistake people often make is to judge the success of a conference that mixes a technical side and a trade show by the trade show only. Clearly times are changing very rapidly and the DATE trade show has declined substantially - witness the large drop in exhibitors and exhibit attendance.

    But for me, the trade show in DATE has always been relatively unimportant compared to the technical tracks, the panels, keynotes, special sessions etc. - for which the (paid) conference attendance kept up very well in 2009, almost the same as in 2008. If the European Design Automation Association (EDAA) which controls DATE (not EDA Ltd., or a group of its ex-employees), breaks even on the event, I would expect to see it continue beyond 2010, perhaps moving around Europe to even go beyond just France and Germany.

    In 2009 the technical/conference side of DATE continued its very strong tradition of high quality (often better than DAC in my book on the system level design side) and I expect that to continue in 2010 and beyond, no matter what happens on the exhibit side. I attended DATE 2009 and found it a great opportunity to learn, talk, and meet and discuss technology with European designers, as I found previous DATEs I attended.

    Best regards
    Grant Martin

    ReplyDelete

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